New Skies 1216 and 1324

2 new skies added to www.pg-skies.net today, both going to be very useful in my humble opinion!

above: 1216 Sun

RONEN BEKERMAN 7 YEARS

7 years! (I suppose this blog must be similarly old...) Amazing work Ronen, congratulations!

Why don't you head on over and read his summary here, and then check out the customary promotions and giveaways here.

PG SKIES are doing a 20% off deal until the end of August with the code:

RONENBDAY7

1856 Dusk Update

A heads up that I have updated 1856 Dusk to include a 'New Sun' version of the hdr file. If you have already bought it through www.pg-skies.net you should get an email notification with a download link. Email me at pgskies@peterguthrie.net if you don't receive an email.

Corona Clouds & 1935 Late Sun

After seeing some very cool tests by Santi Sánchez of Tresde ArchViz Studio , we've been playing around with Corona fog applied to a simple plane with 3dsmax displacement and noise modifiers. Very simple but gives some good results. Looking forward to Corona volumetrics supporting 3d noise.

432 Park by Rafael Vinoly seemed to be an obvious choice. Model from turbosquid by Yusuf Joher Taherali.

Take 25% off '1935 Late Sun' for the next 24 hours with the code 1935CLOUDS (apply the code before you pay!)

New Skies 1213 and 1233

'1233 Sun Clouds'

2 new skies added to www.pg-skies.net today, '1213 Cloudy Blue Sky' and '1233 Sun Clouds'. Taken 20 minutes apart, you have the choice of the sun obscured by clouds or the with the sun visible. 1233 includes a version with a corrected sun intensity.

Updated PG SKIES

Those of you who bought '1714 Clear Sky' should have received an automated email from www.pg-skies.net notifying you of an update to 1714. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am going through a process of updating old skies that feature a strong sun to include a new alternative version.

When shooting HDR skies, it is very difficult to capture the full dynamic range of the sun as it is so incredibly bright. To combat this, in the past (following on from Bertrand Benoit's lead) I adopted a workflow that involves lowering the gamma of the HDR to make the bright parts of the sky brighter. This method has its drawbacks though, mostly in that it makes the colours in the sky a lot harsher, and sometimes makes the sky appear too bright in relation to the sun.

A few months ago I saw a post on the corona forum by dubcat who shared a nice method for adding a rendered sun (with the correct intensity) in to one of my HDR skies. To me it feels like a slightly more scientific method than simply painting in a brighter sun with Photoshop (also can work well), and I liked the results I was getting.

The new version included with 1714 is called 1714 Clear Sky_NewSun.hdr and to use you just need to remember to return the gamma value to 1.0 otherwise you'll get some very ugly results.

We at The Boundary used 1714 NewSun for our 87 Park project for Renzo Piano and were very happy with the results.

1935 Late Sun - Triple-D

My favourite 3 images from Triple-D's latest project, Farmhouse by Maas Architects

Triple-D made great use of the new '1935 Late Sun' sky on www.pg-skies.net and went with the 'New Sun' version of the HDR which has the intensity of the sun artificially corrected so that you don't need to play around with gamma settings.

I'm preparing a new blog post going into this in more detail.


BLACK FRIDAY 2015

1935 Late Sun

Its discount PG SKIES time of year again.

Head over to www.pg-skies.net and use the following codes:

BLACK20 - Baseline 20% off
BLACK30 - 30% off orders over 100 euros
BLACK40 - 40% off orders over 250 euros
BLACK50 - 50% off orders over 500 euros